'Til All Are One

Microsoft claim that their UAC secur­ity prompts in Vista are designed to annoy you. I’m try­ing hard to take them ser­i­ously and to not laugh them off… but did they really think it’d work? OEMs and users have been dis­abling it in droves. Other users have prob­ably taught their muscle memory to auto­mat­ic­ally click the Continue/​Allow but­ton without the slight­est acknow­ledge­ment or thought. I think Microsoft need to get their act together when it comes to UIs. Some of their recent efforts have been frus­trat­ingly incon­sist­ent.

A major reason given by Microsoft in their UAC scan­dal was to encour­age developers to avoid priv­ilege elev­a­tions as much as pos­sible. A noble cause, espe­cially in the security-​​inexperienced world of Win­dows devel­op­ment, albeit poorly executed. It reminds me of Apple’s per­petual oppos­i­tion to the multi-​​button mouse. One stated reason is to enforce more ‘sane’, ‘usable’ and con­sist­ent UI design, and over­all I think they’ve done well. They don’t ban multi-​​button mice (‘XY-​​PIDSes’?), but given the simple one-​​button default there’s less need for them. I might prefer using a con­ven­tional 3-​​button scroll mouse, or even Apple’s own Mighty Mouse (a cleverly-​​disguised multi-​​button mouse), but I don’t lose any func­tion­al­ity by not using them.

It goes to show how much the graph­ical inter­face can be influ­enced by its phys­ical input, some­thing a lot of us don’t acknow­ledge in today’s world of >100-​​key QWERTY key­boards, multi-​​button mice and multi-​​finger touch­pads. The real innov­a­tion in that space seems to be hap­pen­ing in the mobile and embed­ded sec­tor, the iPhone being a good example. Play­ers of games on both desktop com­puters and games con­soles might notice the dif­fer­ence in ‘look and feel’ between games designed for keyboard/​mouse versus con­trol pad. Par­tic­u­larly for action and strategy games, ports from desktop to con­sole (or vice versa) often aren’t suc­cess­ful. The soft­ware was designed with the assump­tion of par­tic­u­lar input devices, and any­thing that devi­ates from this will also alter the feel of the game.

LotD: Your Win­dows licence fees paid to make this

I love Grease, don’t you? There’s some logic in the title. It is sum­mer here in Aus­tralia, and as many may know Aus­tralian sum­mers are typ­ic­ally very hot and dry. A lot has happened over the past few weeks and I’ve been too lazy to type it out here. I’ll split things into sev­eral entries for the sake of readability.

Back in July, I bought myself a nice new Ath­lon 2100+ sys­tem. This machine is lightyears ahead of my old Pen­tium II 350, and now I can do many things that wern’t prac­tical on the old sys­tem. When I got the machine, I put it through a rig­or­ous bar­rage of tests, includ­ing memtest86, heavy com­pil­ing and cpub­urn. It passed with fly­ing colours.

How­ever, in the past couple of months, I’ve been hav­ing prob­lems with heat. When I ran the tests, it was the middle of winter. Now it is sum­mer, and room tem­per­at­ures can eas­ily hit 35 degrees or more. Using lm_​sensors, I found that my CPU was about 70 degrees or more on a hot day — and that’s just at idle. If I tried com­pil­ing some­thing or play­ing a game like Quake 3 or Unreal Tour­na­ment, it would eas­ily go past 85 degrees. This trig­gers the over­heat pro­tec­tion sys­tem on my ASUS A7V333 mother­board to shut the com­puter down (an Ath­lon can only take 90 degrees before fry­ing itself). I’ve been saved many times by that — had my mother­board not had that fea­ture (most boards don’t) I would’ve lost my CPU.

I had to use my sys­tem very care­fully to pre­vent shut­down. This is obvi­ously unac­cept­able, but I had to wait until mid-​​December before I could do any­thing about it (I was busy with other things). The heat­sink on my CPU was stand­ard AMD-​​issue — noth­ing spe­cial. I decided to pur­chase some­thing bet­ter, finally set­tling on the Thermal­take Vol­cano 9. I made an order on an online shop­ping site and much to my sur­prise it was delivered only three hours later! The owner of the store lives only a block or two away from me, and he decided to deliver it him­self on his way home. Now that’s what I call ser­vice!

I don’t trust myself with expens­ive equip­ment (I’ll mess around with older/​cheaper stuff, though), so I decided to get the heat­sink installed by the guy I bought my com­puter from. He’s a nice guy, and I’ve been deal­ing with him for a num­ber of years, so I know he’s good. I opened the heat­sink box for the first time. This thing is a mon­ster! It was so big that we couldn’t install it without tak­ing the mother­board out. It sounds like a heli­copter, but over time I’ve got­ten used to the noise. What’s import­ant is that I can use my sys­tem at full throttle without fear of burn­ing it out.